Wednesday, July 02, 2014
Samsung Galaxy S5 More Popular Than iPhone 5S in Europe

Europeans iPhone users seems to be moving over to Android thanks to the Samsung Galaxy S5.

The latest smartphone sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech shows that Samsung's latest flagship phone has become very popular in Europe.

In May, the first full month that the handset was widely on sale in Europe and the US, the Galaxy S5 became the third best-selling handset in the UK (behind the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C), and across the five major European markets, 17 percent of consumers that bought the handset dumped their iPhone to do so, while just over half (58%) were upgrading from an existing Samsung phone.

In the US, the phone was the second most popular handset behind the iPhone 5S, and former iPhone owners made up 8 percent of the handset's sales for the month. However, according to Kantar, the majority of Galaxy S5 buyers in the US were former LG or HTC handset owners.

For May, Android represents 73.3 percent of the European smartphone market with Apple in a distant second with a 16.6 percent share and Microsoft in third with 8.1 percent.

In the US, combined handset sales across all models saw Samsung become the biggest-selling smartphone brand -- 36.8 percent of phones sold in the US in May were Samsung, compared to 32.5 percent that were iPhones.